Thoughts on Steven Zucker’s Essay on Student Course Evaluations

The latest issue of the American Mathematical Society’s Notices includes an essay by Steven Zucker [PDF], a mathematician at Johns Hopkins University. In the essay Zucker argues that student course evaluations are not appropriate for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching and that the use of “surveys” to do so “pushes us to dumb down our courses” in an attempt to make students happier by making courses easier.

How are instructors “dumbing down” their courses? Zucker’s list includes “building the subject slowly from the bottom up,” “giving lots of examples in class,” “dropping topics from the syllabus when convenient,” and using homework problems as “models” for exam problems. I disagree. I consider scaffolding learning, helping students learn inductively, focusing more on depth than breadth, and aligning practice with assessment to be elements of effective teaching. I may be misreading Zucker’s claims here, but I don’t think so.

I also find questionable Zucker’s advice to “accept that most of the learning takes place outside of class.” I think that the classroom is an under-utilized venue for learning, which is why I’m such a proponent of using classroom response systems and other student engagement techniques.

What are your thoughts? Does Zucker’s opinion piece reflect common faculty perspectives on your campus?

Regarding learning taking place outside of class, if he lives in a 100% lecture universe, then that’s probably the case. However, it would be erroneous (I think) to accept that most of the learning SHOULD take place outside of class. I really fell in love with emphasizing shared student/instructor responsibility for learning when I read Mary Ellen Weimer’s Learner-Centered Teaching. I now have a 300-word teaching philosophy that explains my take on it that goes in every course policies/expectations document. I’ll be emphasizing it a fair bit when working with faculty from King Saud University at the end of the month, too.

I’m glad the Notices is running more things on teaching. However, with Krantz as editor, I’m not sure what we’re going to get. He makes his views pretty clear in his book How to Teach Mathematics, and it’s pretty clear that the literature and current debate among those who follow it are not high on his list of interests.

The problem with statements like “learning takes place outside of class” or “should take place outside of class” is that there are different kinds of learning taking place in any class, and venues that work well for some cognitive tasks work very poorly for others.

“Learning” in the form of initial acquisition of content knowledge, from what I see in the research literature, works at least as well (and the literature strongly suggests it’s much more effective) when done by students outside of class via podcasts, videos, guided reading assignments, etc. as it does via a lecture. On the other hand, “learning” in the sense of assimilating facts and putting concepts together seems to be much more effective when done in the class sessions, working with others using well-designed activities created and managed by an instructor, than when done outside (via the usual homework sets and so on).

Without specifying *which* kinds of learning need to take place outside of class and then specifying which should take place in class, we end up setting up an environment where students think all learning should be in class and instructors think all learning should be outside of class, and in the end nobody learns anything.

Zucker actually doesn’t explicitly state what appears to be his main point, which seems to be that universities still accept the learning-as-transmission model as the default and that evaluations perpetuate that default by the way they are constructed, and that this is bad. But in fact he doesn’t come out and say what he thinks the model for instruction really ought to be, or whether evaluations ought to drive a change in instructional modes or vice versa. That would have been helpful to see, and in fact it’s difficult to judge the merits of an essay on evaluations without knowing the ideal student are supposed to be evaluating. Like Mitch said, it’s good to see the AMS paying some kind of attention to this though, and perhaps Zucker will elaborate on this in a future column.

It’d be news to Georgia Tech’s (outgoing) Provost that learning-as-transmission isn’t what we’re aiming for. I’ve heard him talk about transmitting knowledge to students as one of the Institute’s functions more times than I care to count. Of course, I’ve also heard him and the Dean of Engineering advocate for (research) job talks as a good way to evaluate someone’s ability to teach freshmen.

Thanks for the comments, fellows. You make some great points about the different kinds of learning and when and where those kinds of learning might best take place. This line from Robert’s comment is particularly insightful:

“Without specifying *which* kinds of learning need to take place outside of class and then specifying which should take place in class, we end up setting up an environment where students think all learning should be in class and instructors think all learning should be outside of class, and in the end nobody learns anything. ”

Zucker raises some important questions about differences between instructor’s expectations for the learning process and students’ expectations. He doesn’t offer any solutions for bridging those differences, however. That’s unfortunate, because I think it’s incredibly important that we as instructors do so.

Mitch, is the teaching philosophy statement you share with your students available online? Sharing such a statement is one way to bridge those differences in expectations, and it would be great to have an example.

Robert, the next time I hear an argument for learning-as-transmission, particularly in the context of lectures, I think I’ll say, “Oh, that’s so pre-Gutenberg of you!” and see what response I get.

My short-form teaching philosophy can be found near the beginning of this PDF.

I was impressed how the students who were assigned the first page of that document when I crowd-sourced my course policies and expectations chose to discuss the teaching philosophy/what the course was like instead of making sure everyone knew my office hours. They seemed genuinely pleased to read about what the course would be like and that I was thinking about their learning and not just what was easiest for me.